{"id":5714,"date":"2021-11-10T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-11-10T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/?p=5714"},"modified":"2021-11-08T19:22:09","modified_gmt":"2021-11-09T02:22:09","slug":"thats-the-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/2021\/11\/thats-the-law\/","title":{"rendered":"That&#8217;s the Law"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Things are always moving towards chaos. It\u2019s a law.<br><br>Not just a law from a government, it\u2019s a science law. Like Gravity. It is not appealable. It is as solid and inevitable as fate.<br><br>I know my life has felt like chaos during for the last two years. But this law in its proper language doesn\u2019t call it chaos. It\u2019s called entropy.<br><br>I just encountered that word in Flow\u2014Csikszentmihalyi used the term \u201cpsychic entropy.\u201d What a combination of words! It sounds like a name for a super villain. But the term is used to describe negative mental efforts\u2014a chaotic state of mind.<br><br>To be more specific, the opposite of psychic entropy is controlled attention. The ugly head of a pandemic has captured my attention. It seemed to control my attention in a way that was hard to escape.<br><br>But it did not add to my life. Flow put a definition to this \u201cIf one chooses a trivial goal, success in it does not provide enjoyment.\u201d The goal of getting through a pandemic alive is a very trivial goal. The kind of experience I\u2019m trying to get back into\u2014what is called flow experiences&#8212; \u201care just as real as being hungry, or as concrete as bumping into a wall. There is nothing mysterious of mystical about them\u2026the self that is part of it expands its boundaries and becomes more complex than it had been\u201d (pg 65)<br><br>I am hungry for this expanding soul. And I am running into the wall of entropy. Devolution. I really want to grow.<br><br>But I can change the direction of the entropy. I can take the psychic energy at my disposal and shift it towards expansion. I\u2019m supposed to be complicated and I love it.<br><br>This stupid narrowing of all attention on one topic squeezes me out of my interestingness and enjoyment in life.<br><br>I did not come here to go small and rigid. This life is too rich to shrink<br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Things are always moving towards chaos. It\u2019s a law. Not just a law from a government, it\u2019s a science law. Like Gravity. It is not appealable. It is as solid and inevitable as fate. I know my life has felt &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/2021\/11\/thats-the-law\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thoughts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5714"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5725,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5714\/revisions\/5725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}